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Paměti Františka Jana Vaváka, souseda a rychtáře milčického z let 1770–1816

Paměti Františka Jana Vaváka, souseda a rychtáře milčického z let 1770–1816

Kniha VI–VII (1810–1816)

Kučera, Martin (ed.)

subjects: biographies and memoirs

paperback, 486 pp., 1. edition
published: march 2009
ISBN: 978-80-246-1482-3
recommended price: 440 czk

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summary

František Jan Vavák (1741–1816) was the most important of the Czech peasant amateur writers. Lacking any formal education, through self-study he achieved considerable cultural insight. This member of the first revivalist generation was a self-taught chronicler, versifier, musician, surveyor and cartographer. In his homestead in Milčice near Poděbrady, he engaged in plant and livestock production and made his own tools. From 1774, as a local mayor, he gained recognition for exercising lawfulness and religious tolerance. The pinnacle of his work is his Memoires in seven volumes – diary entries with fading popular Baroque piousness and a new high degree of national and Estates consciousness. The first five volumes of the Memoires were published in 1907–1938 by the historian of religion Father Jindřich Skopec (1873–1940), the remaining two volumes from 1810–1816 were prepared for publishing by Stanislava Jonášová-Hájková (1903–1985), a student of historian Jan Pekař, during the Protectorate times. The work, gained from her estate, was revised and completed, and complemented by an introductory essay.